The Slow Fall of Babel: Languages and Identities in Late Antique Christianity by Yuliya Minets (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Slow Fall of Babel: Languages and Identities in Late Antique Christianity by Yuliya Minets Carson Bay The Slow Fall of Babel: Languages and Identities in Late Antique Christianity Yuliya Minets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xvi + 418. ISBN: 978-1-108-83346-2 Presses are encouraged to submit books dealing with Late Antiquity for consideration for review to any of JLA's three Book Review Editors: Maria Doerfler (maria.doerfler@yale.edu); John Weisweiler (j.weisweiler@lmu.de); and Damián Fernández (dfernandez@niu.edu). Minets' illuminating study of sociolinguistic history is a helpful and ambitious—and, in retrospect, natural—extension of the idea of (Mediterranean) Late Antiquity qua period of study et qua era of cultural diversity established by Peter Brown, among others. The study maps linguistic usage among Christians through the late sixth to early seventh centuries, elucidates Christian ideas about such multilingualism, and attempts to "explicate the ways in which Christian intellectuals 'used' language … in their ideological speculations on what it means to be a Christian" (11). The "Introduction: Awakening to Linguistic Otherness" grounds the study methodologically and bibliographically at the crossroads of socio-linguistics and ancient history, defining key concepts—the "alloglottic other," "sociolects," and so on—and arguing that linguistic alterity as an object of thought and discourse constitutes a productive analytical lens. "Chapter 1: Meeting the Alloglottic Other" provides historical context: a later Roman world structured by Greek-Latin bilingualism; a Near East characterized by a complex multilingual past; an Egypt largely split between Greek-dominated Alexandria and the Coptic of rural, monastic Upper Egypt; a North Africa forged from the interface between Latin and local languages (for example, Punic); and a Europe-Balkan region where Latin came to dominate literature even as numerous languages and dialects enjoyed largely non-literary existence across regions and eras. All this glottal multiplicity also operationalized trans-regional doctrinal controversies. This wonderful survey of socio-linguistics across late antique Christianity depicts "an astonishing mosaic of dynamic combinations" (52) and provides a mountain of socio-historical data within which any reader will learn things she did not know before. "Chapter 2: Languages and Identities in Greco-Roman and Jewish Antiquity" steps back in time to argue that Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions provided frameworks for Christian ways of thinking/talking about other languages, their speakers, and cross-linguistic communication. Minets surveys by genre and chronology a self-consciously monolingual Greek antiquity that gave way through the Hellenistic period to a bilingual Greek and Roman/Latin world—multilingualism could now be imagined as praiseworthy. Simultaneously, "the linguistic universe of the ancient Jews was quintessentially multilingual" (97) due to historical-political circumstances. Yet, [End Page 550] in Greek, Roman, and Jewish antiquity, language was rarely marked as important for identity: Greeks assumed Greek as the language, Romans recognized Latin and Greek as co-existent culture-carriers, and Jews became used to multiple languages early on. This trifold framework constitutes Minets' backdrop for describing language among early Christians. "Chapter 3: The Tower of Babel and Beyond" addresses how the textually-confused Tower of Babel narrative (Genesis 11) affected how Christians rendered that biblical episode in Greek, Latin, and Syriac and how they thought about primordial language and subsequent multilingualism. Minets discusses how Christian enthusiasm for the Hebrew language eventually fueled Christian appropriation of Hebrew identity (especially in Eusebius). She shows how Christians, alongside Jewish tradition, alternately presented Hebrew after Babel as having disappeared (Ambrosiaster, Ps.-Clementine Recognitions) or become the (proto-) Jewish language (Origen, John Chrysostom); others (Gregory of Nyssa, Theodoret of Cyrrhus) even claimed that Hebrew had not been the ur-language of Babel. An expert guide through a host of late ancient texts and authors, Minets rolls this discussion into an account of how Christians apprehended the many other languages they knew of, both human and divine. All of this complicated Christian rumination over whether the Babel episode constituted a sacralized disaster, or a disastrous blessing: was divinely orchestrated language diversity a net good or a net bad? Answers given by authors like Jacob of Serug, Ephrem, and Cyril of Alexandria show that the issue was complicated, and Minets convincingly argues that the...